Years ago, computers were isolated devices that did not communicate with each other. But, today computers are often connected in networks, such as the Internet or World Wide Web, and a user at one computer, often called a client, may wish to access information at multiple other computers, often called servers, via a network. Information is often stored at servers and sent to the clients in units of pages, which are connected together via embedded links. A link is an address, such as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of a linked page that is embedded in a linking page that, when selected, causes the linked page to be retrieved. Web site domains often include multiple linked pages that were created by a single author or organization or that have related content or are part of a common topic. For example, a company that sells nails might have a web site domain with a main page that introduces the company and contains links to various other pages, such as a page that shows a map of the company's location, a page that describes the various types of nails that the company sells, and a page that describes using the nails in various applications.
Because domains may have many linked pages and every site is organized differently, a visitor to the site, especially a first-time user, may experience difficulty in determining the exact page with the information of interest to that user. But, even a user who has visited the domain frequently may experience difficulty remembering the exact page that contains the information of interest. In addition, a user who has frequently visited the domain may already have a well established usage history for the domain, and yet the user still may experience difficulty in remembering which set of links, making up particular paths, need to be traversed in order to find previously visited pages in the domain.
One current technique that attempts to address the aforementioned problems is bookmarks, also known as favorites, which allows users to save the addresses of favorite pages and then, in the future, retrieve those pages directly without searching for them or navigating through the links of a domain. Unfortunately, for bookmarks to be useful, the user must have previously visited the page and must remember to set the bookmark. Thus, bookmarks do not assist users in finding information within a domain that they have never visited before and do not assist users if they do not set the bookmark.
Thus, a better way is needed to aid users in finding and returning to pages of interest within domains.